The state of California fined Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles $25,000 for nearly killing actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins in November last year after medical staff accidentally administrated them incorrect doses of the blood-thinner heparin.

The twins, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace, born via a gestational carrier on November 8, almost lost their lives on November 20, after being given an overdose of heparin on November 18.

Heparin is a common injectable anticoagulant derived from mucosal tissues of slaughtered meat animals such as porcine intestine or bovine lung. Just 1 unit of Heparin is required to keep 1 mL of cat blood fluid for 24 hours at 0°C, and the twins, along with another newborn patient, received 10,000 units. The normal dosage for a newborn is just 10 units.

"Our kids are bleeding from everyplace that they've punctured," Quaid recently recalled the event in an interview. "They were working on (our son) Boone, whose belly button would not stop bleeding ... blood squirted across the room .... It was blood everywhere. It was a life-and-death situation."

Fortunately, the patients were all treated and did not show any ill effects from the overdose, according to hospital officials, who admitted that the overdose was a result of an error by the hospital staff, and also issued an apology to Quaid and his wife, Kimberly Buffington, and the family of the other infant who received the wrong dosage.

In addition to Cedars-Sinai, ten other hospitals have been penalized for violations that caused or were likely to cause "serious injury or death to patients," Los Angeles Times reported.

The punishment came as a result to an investigation conducted by the California Department of Public Health, which revealed "multiple failures by the facility to adhere to established policies and procedures for safe medication use."

"The hospitals take this extremely seriously," state deputy director Kathleen Billingsley told the Los Angeles Times Thursday.

According to Dr. Michael L. Langberg, Cedars-Sinai chief medical officer, a pharmacy technician at the hospital stored the higher dosages of heparin in the wrong place, so the nurse who grabbed the medicine to administer it to the babies mistakenly administered the wrong dosage. The nurses who administered the medication were also guilty of administering the drugs without verifying the dosages.

The hospital was found to not have adequately educated its staff about the safe use of the blood-thinner.

In the meantime, Quaid took legal action against the makers of the blood-thinner, claiming the labeling of the drug was also at fault for the mishap.